Taylor Swift, according to Klosterman, is not what she seems. She is deeper than people are willing to believe, a fact derived from her femaleness. I agree with Klosterman’s statement that this treatment would be different if she were a male artist. Our pop culture has always associated femininity with shallowness and aesthetic properties, not much beyond that. Our female celebrities, many like to believe, are two dimensional. It happens to many other female artists too, like Nicki Minaj or Britney Spears. Klosterman’s argument about Swift’s gender affecting how her audience treats her is a true one: because she is a woman, pop culture makes her seem shallow and ignores her many depths.
Klosterman also talks of fabricating lives. Swift has fabricated her career, has built her career deliberately herself. He touches on the fact that celebrities have to built their persona and Swift has to a greater extent tangled herself in her persona. Even people who aren’t famous have to navigate this, now more than ever. With social media, we have to create our own personas that we show to the entire world online, tangling ourselves within these personas. Social media has changed the way we portray ourselves and, as Klosterman accurately argues, the way the celebrities are interpreted and can keep track of how they fare in public opinion.
Overall, I agree with Klosterman. Swift’s career and public interpretation has been shaped largely by two factors: her gender and social media. Both factors have changed the path of her career, a truth that Klosterman successfully explored.
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